“It is a flag we’ve planted that we will protect and defend. We have a plan. It’s called Medicare.”

That’s from Nancy Pelosi, who called me from Wisconsin, where she’s holding events today defending Medicare in Paul Ryan’s back yard. On the call, Pelosi laid out a message on Medicare she hopes Dems will use for — well, forever.

Pelosi recently came under fire from Republicans — and even some liberals — when she recently indicated that Medicare should be “on the table” for deficit reduction. Republicans claimed she now agreed with them; some liberals wondered whether even Pelosi — whose sharp line on Social Security enabled Dems to beat back George W Bush’s privatization scheme — is preparing to cave.

Asked to clarify what she meant, and to detail what sort of changes she’d be open to, Pelosi insisted that any claims she could support cuts in the program are wrong. “No benefits cuts,” she said flatly. Pelosi added that Dems have already put on the table the type of reform they should continue advocating for: The Affordable Care Act.

I have to admit, I love her style: planting a flag, “protect and defend”, the whole nine yards.

If Ds nationwide, in general, in whatever races they’re in, took this to heart, they’d gain another 2-3% just on FU points. Better yet, they’d start to change the narrative about how Ds deal with a challenge and/or fight back and/or clearly state what they’re for – which is what a majority of this country wants anyway.

@Baud: Well, all those deluded old Fox viewers did say they wanted the government out of their Medicare. The GOP is giving them exactly what they said they wanted. It’s always sad to see what happens when idiots vote for jackals.

And I hope democrats keep Medicare on the table, along with SS and the ACA. The first two are laced with political poison and better to make the wingnuts not be able to help themselves and start feasting. The ACA is still somewhat vulnerable, because it is barely out of bundle of joy basket. But each day that goes by, a few more Americans see some benefit to them, and at some point they will join SS and Medicare on the third rail of politics.

That said, none of this matters much as health care costs keep going up because that is what profit models do when there is no incentive, or real choice for consumers to forgo it to create true competition in a private market. It will all collapse, and likely take the economy and country with it at some point, if the political will to replace that profit model with a vital service model administered by the non profit government. Single payer, or bust

I love Nancy, but the rest of dem leadership says the same thing in different ways. It is the dem pol golden goose, or one of them, and only insanity would make them damage it in any fundamental way.

@Reality Check:
Just a word of advice Reality Check. The phrase “the Democrat Party” tells us that anything else you say is not to be taken seriously and you will most likely be entirely ignored going forward.

@beltane:
The core principles of the Democratic Party have been, since the age of Jackson, “we’ll leave you alone to do your own thing at the state and local level, so long as you get behind our national candidates.” The 60s were an anomaly. It was a good anomaly, yes, but an anomaly all the same.

And its not like Nancy Pelosi isn’t wrapped up in this tradition. Her job is to preserve and expand the party coalition, and its a job that she is very, very good at. Probably the best the Democratic Party has seen, at least in Congress, since Sam Rayburn.

I’m glad we’re no longer living in a world where people believe that Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and Defense come from thin air, but NPR takes up 96% of the budget.

It’s a sad shame that the Ryan plan is what brought that into focus.

Somehow I don’t think Granny McFagBasher would think that the nine most dangerous words in the English language are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” if uncle Sam stopped giving her free shit.

I applaud Nancy Pelosi, but how did we let it get to this point in the first place? We need some sort of reverse tax return for the rectal-cranial inverted “conservative” geriatrics that says “your health insurance cost the average taxpayer X dollars this year”.

ObamaCare does nothing to address Medicare. Nothing, except cutting off seniors at the knees but making drastic cuts while not ensuring future solvency. It also drains money from Medicare by promising “free” healthcare to everyone else, hich means less money for Grandma (which leads to Canadian-style rationing and things like “end of life counseling”, aka, deathpanels, and yes they are in the bill. That’s why it drives you crazy Palin coined such a pithy term for it).

You know what? You’re absolutely right. And you know what else? Monkeys are about to start flying out of your ass. Really, it’s the truth, because Rush Limbaugh told me so himself. So you’d better go open a window and sit on the sill so they have somewhere to go. And be sure to report back to us.

We’re giving young people a choice when they reach retirement with an enhanced form of Medicare that gives them market-based choices, rather than forcing them into rationing and death panels to save money, we will use market efficiencies and competition.

This sounds very nice and without doing something somewhere somehow to control costs, Medicare will crash and burn.

That’s just reality.

There is not enough money in the universe to continue to pay for Medicare if health care costs keep going for the next 30 years the way they’ve been going up for the last 30 years.

Either we need to get costs under control, or Medicare benefits will be cut.

Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats need to start telling people that. Otherwise we’re in for the kind of economic collapse people have only read about in books: the 2008 crash will just be warm-up.

If you guys cheering Pelosi think America can spend 32% of its GDP on Health Care, you’re deluding yourselves. But that’s what “no benefit cuts” with no talk of a credible practical way of reducing health care costs in America boils down to.

Hint: there is one proven way and only one proven way to cut health care costs. It’s not a mystery. Every other civilized country on earth has reached the same conclusion–except us. This method of cutting health care costs is called “nationalized single-payer health care,” and, yes, it does including rationing for some non-critical types of care, like cosmetic surgery.

Let’s face it, folks — the stuff that “Reality Check” is flinging around here really is as good as the right wing can possibly scrounge up. Change isn’t happening nearly as fast as we’d all like it to happen, but considering the relative competence of the people trying to bring that change about, and the glaring incompetence of the people trying to prevent it, we’re looking at a fairly good political stretch over the longer term.

and do you know what the serf’s betters do for him after he rides to his defense? They force his wife to suckle their hound pups(true story told to me by a Russian professor of Russian history whose grandfather had been a serf)

He’s a reality check already…only the reality is not one I wish to revisit.

@Reality Check: First of all I note you failed to address the point that your assertion of “imminent bankruptcy” was wrong.

Second of all, you followed your claim that the ACA “does nothing to address Medicare” with a load of horseshit which, basically, acknowledged the fact that the ACA _does_ do something to address Medicare, but you just don’t like that fact. Here’s a link I turned up in five seconds with Mr. Google: http://www.medicalnewstoday.co.....225468.php

Third…Palin is a joke. Seriously. As for your crediting her with the “death panels” lie…that crediting is also a lie, she simply repeated Betsy McCaughey’s lie. While I knew of the provenance of the lie, I couldn’t remember it’s author’s name…turning that up took less than five seconds with Mr. Google.

No, America’s for profit health-insurance system and its greedy medical care providers will bankrupt America. Every other modern, First-world nation(and some not so modern as well) have figured out health care. America could, too. Except for the 100,000,000 brain-dead, selfish, moronic serfs like you that inhabit its shores.

Why don’t you just move to Somalia where you can set up your own government free Randian paradise? I’m sure everyone here would be happy to pitch in to give a nice grubstake to get you started.

@mclaren: Most of the people here who agree with you — hell, most of the physicians I know support single payer. The real cost-containment will require a complete change in how we reimburse with a shift to non-procedure/service based payments. Period.

But in the current climate with the entire Republican party in thrall to low-info “deep thinkers” like our current parrot troll and the billionaires do you think the Democratic Party should just walk the plank?

Hell, these are the guys who can make Head Start and public education into a soshulist plot.

@JCT: I agree with single payer. As I’ve said here before, it was actually on my state’s ballot in the 1990s and I voted for it. It got crushed (I live in CA).

My typical answer in such cases is that people who insist upon “single payer or nothing” as an answer really need to get out and build support for their position. Get some states to pass it. Then come back to us. Hell, if you choose _my_ state as one in which to pass it I’ll happily vote “yes” again (next time try to convince more than 20% of the public…). But if you’re not going to build effective public support for that position, then I’ll favor other solutions that, while in my view non-optimal, are at least helpful.

My personal opinion is that single payer will not occur until a state of health care dystopia sets in, or less likely, a minute or two before. We are a revolutionary country created from breaking free of an oppressive government.

The problem is, that people are unwilling to spend the time to actually learn about things like single payer beforehand, or most any government social program that is proposed. So the default position of wary of government that is woven into our selves at a basic level, makes it relatively easy for others, like the confederates, to demagogue and lie.

And only after much pain and effort over decades of need and effort, something like the ACA gets passed, barely, and flawed. And like SS and Medicare, as the law takes effect and folks can see it is there to help them and not oppress them, then, it becomes wildly popular. This is our country, imho.

@General Stuck: As a Wilderness Society and Sierra Club member who’s quite aware of it’s history, I agree with your last paragraph. I guess I’m just hoping to persuade some “single-payer-or-nothing” folks to start acting like Bob Marshall, Ansel Adams, John Muir, Howard Zahniser, etc.

@The Fat Kate Middleton (aka Jim, Once): Nope. It hasn’t touched above the lower middle class yet. Actually, I don’t think there will be much progress made until Sulzberger goes to Brooks and says “You know, I could hire 3 Filipinos and 4 Indians for the amount I spend on your insurance and no one would even care” and acts accordingly.

The problem is that a lot of medical costs have nothing at all to do with health care.

This is just plain not true. Medical costs determine how much medical care you can provide. That’s just a basic fact. Given X amount of tax dollars, you can provide enough medical care to avoid having people dropping dead like flies if you use a nationalized single-payer system to reduce costs. If you don’t make any effort to reduce costs, then you will get 45,000 people per year in America dying because they don’t have access to health care.

This isn’t me making stuff up. This comes from a Harvard research study. You don’t believe me? Great, argue with the editors of the peer-reviewed scientific journal that published the Harvard study — explain to them why 45,000 people in America aren’t actually dying every year because they don’t have access to health care.

They do have, however, a great deal to do with the nourishment of parasites on the health care system.

Well, what’s a parasite? Most people would agree that for-profit health insurance is essentially parasitic. It serves no useful purpose. But if we go farther, why should we have for-profit big pharma companies? Why shouldn’t government just develop the drugs and release ’em into the public domain? And why should we have for-profit doctors?

This gets to a slippery slope real fast, because it’s not obvious to me why we should have for-profit banks, for example. Turn every bank into a credit union: zero profit. Why not? Who would that hurt?

Somewhere north of 80% of the American economy is based on parasitic behavior, as far as I can tell, but that’s a bridge too far, trying to eliminate all that useless worthless parasitic behavior in American society. Howzabout we just try to stick with simple easy tasks for now, like reducing health care costs to sane levels on par with the rest of the G20?

…why should we have for-profit big pharma companies? Why shouldn’t government just develop the drugs and release ‘em into the public domain…

Given that so much research is done into genuinely new and different medicines and in particularly the underlying research by public universities, which is then often sold to pharma. co’s for relatively (to the pharmco) little money, there’s something to that.

Folks, it’s a logical impossibility to be in favor of nationalized single-payer health care while at the same time advocating turning over the entire American health care system to for-profit health insurance cartels.

The two options are mutually exclusive.

That’s like being in favor of abortion while advocating the death penality for ending a pregnancy artificially. You cannot have both options. One excludes the other.

Either you Obots have got to give up on flogging the bad bad bad bad bad idea of turning the entire U.S. health care system over to collusive greedy corrupt for-profit cartels…

…Or you have got to give up on claiming you’re in favor of nationalized single-payer health care.

Either you Obots have got to give up on flogging the bad bad bad bad bad idea of turning the entire U.S. health care system over to collusive greedy corrupt for-profit cartels… …Or you have got to give up on claiming you’re in favor of nationalized single-payer health care.

One or the other, folks. You can’t have both.

Better yet, why don’t we do an intervention and have mclaren committed for nutty blog commenting.

My personal opinion is that single payer will not occur until a state of health care dystopia sets in, or less likely, a minute or two before.

This seems to be a problem of the entire homo sapiens species. We’re excellent at dealing with problems on a time frame of next week. We’re crappy at dealing with problems on a time frame of 20 years from now. See global warming, Peak Oil, etc., etc., etc.

We are a revolutionary country created from breaking free of an oppressive government.

No, actually America is a country of terrorists who shot down soldiers of their king from behind while hiding behind hedgerows. No wonder we hate and fear terrorists so much: you always despise in others what you see in yourself.

The problem is, that people are unwilling to spend the time to actually learn about things like single payer beforehand, or most any government social program that is proposed.

There’s no evidence to support this claim, and vast amounts of evidence contradicting it. Polls consistently show support for single-payer nationalized health care above 60%. It’s a Fox News fantasy that most people in America don’t want socialized medicine.

The poll, which compares answers to the same questions from 30 years ago, finds that, “59% [of Americans] say the government should provide national health insurance, including 49% who say such insurance should cover all medical problems.”

Only 32% think that insurance should be left to private enterprise.

“Another Poll Shows Majority Support for Single-Payer”

So the default position of wary of government that is woven into our selves at a basic level, makes it relatively easy for others, like the confederates, to demagogue and lie.

That is flat out not true, and I’ve just showed it’s not true. The evidence is overwhelming: the vast majority of Americans want single-payer health care.

And only after much pain and effort over decades of need and effort, something like the ACA gets passed, barely, and flawed. And like SS and Medicare, as the law takes effect and folks can see it is there to help them and not oppress them, then, it becomes wildly popular. This is our country, imho.

The pain and effort and decades of failure required before the ACA got passed are entirely due to the massive cartelization of the U.S. health care system. This problem wouldn’t face us if we had prevented these goddamn corrupt collusive cartels from forming in the first place.

Obama could have and should have unleashed the Department of Justice’s anti-trust hounds of hell on the AMA, the entire health insurance industry, hospitals, doctors, imaging clinics, and medical devicemakers. Round ’em up en-masse, perp-walk into courtrooms. Charge the bastards with conspiracy, price-fixing, bribery, corruption, collusion, violation of the Sherman anti-trust act, and several thousand other crimes.

Then try ’em before a jury of sick people.

When the convictions roll in, Obama sits down with the AMA and the hospitals and the big pharma companies and the imaging clinics and all the medical devicemakers.

“Hey guys, you’ve got a choice. Either you can agree to help shift to a nationalized single-payer health care system and work hard to ease the transition…or you can spend the next thirty years in assrape prison forming a train with a line of guys named Bubba and Aryan Reich Bobby.”

@mclaren: I believe the choices right now are ACA vs. medicare vouchers whose cost savings to the federal purse will be offset by another round of destabilizing tax cuts, thereby causing yet another deficit scam such that my guess is that even those vouchers will be taken away in the 21 years between now and the time I am too old to get up and go to work.

It is possible for me to favor a different solution, but right now, unless I think “gee the estimated 50 million additional uninsured under the Ryan plan will get us closer to single payor” I’d best look at what people in power are actually debating.

That is flat out not true, and I’ve just showed it’s not true. The evidence is overwhelming: the vast majority of Americans want single-payer health care.

Then feel free to show this on my fairly blue state’s ballot, I voted for it last time, I’ll vote for it this time. It got a bit less than the crazification factor when it last appeared there. Prove it’s a viable option by mobilizing voters to get it passed.

LOL, nice of you to link a 2009 poll, before the health care reform debate swung into high gear. The GOP successfully turned even the private company based ACA into big government boogyman and won an election for their trouble.

I didn’t say Americans opposed single payer, only that they are easily manipulated by screams of “government health care” when the rubber meets the road, like the 2010 HCR debate, and the many past efforts that failed to get reform of any kind. And that is due to latent or fundamental mistrust of government. imo

the difference between mclaren and RC is that at least RC is fighting with the folks on the other team. mclaren on the other hand likes to fight with people who, for all intents and purposes, agree with him.

I would say, that every god-fearing, wank-loving, man, woman and child on this blog favors single payer. Most just don’t see the political roadmap to get there other than taking the ACA and tweaking it year, after year, after year, after year.

Mclaren, your rantings aside, show us the road map and we will support it. Show us your votes in the Senate and we will vote for you for president. Barring that, how about lobbing a few grenades over the wall at the bad guys from time to time?

(nevermind that no poor person ever gave anyone a job or employed anybody!)

I disrespectfully disagree. Supply side bullshit has proven to be bullshit; it is demand that creates jobs and employment. Poor people spend more of the money they have, (velocity) creating demand. Give rich people more money, they sit on more of it, proportionally.(Lower velocity.) Give poor people more money, voila! more demand. So the answer is to rescind the tax cuts for the rich assholes who are, and have been, refusing to do their part to boost the economy, and give it to the poor and middle class, who will do their part to boost the economy.
Or we could just bake their fat asses into pies to feed the hungry.

Particularly because of this: where she’s holding events today defending Medicare in Paul Ryan’s back yard.
I guess the assumption is Pelosi has gone rogue, which would be really unusual and noteworthy, that, or Obama isn’t really in the Democratic Party.They are campaigning for 2012.

This is exactly the statement she used in 2005 when Bush was pushing his SS plan. When the media would ask the Dems why they weren’t making a counter-offer, Pelosi responded, “We have a plan, it’s called Social Security.”

@Chris Andersen: But, but… David Brooks will smell sour cheese and wonder why Nancy SMASH isn’t serious and won’t address the long-term solvency of the welfare state on a slanted playing field designed to trap liberals into negotiating with sociopaths.